Monday, January 12, 2015

A couple of months ago, Google started rolling out its new Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system and one of the most prominent changes in the Lollipop release is a redesigned user interface built around the “Material design”.

Here’s Google’s definition of Material design: “a visual language for users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science”.Google has left behind the world of skeuomorphic design and the result is something that looks more eye-catching.

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Statistical Analysis and Data Mining? Middleware and Integration Software?
There are good times for you if you have these skills!

"Statistical analysis and data
mining" topped LinkedIn's list of the 25 Hottest Skills That Got
People Hired in 2014, moving up from number 5 in 2013.

"We live in an increasingly data driven world, and businesses are
aggressively hiring experts in data storage, retrieval, and analysis.
Across the globe, statistics and data analysis skills were highly
valued" Sohan Murthy, research
consultant at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post.

Glassdoor reports a median salary of $118,709 for a data scientist
and $64,537 for a programmer.

If you have any involvement in data analytics and want to develop your
career, is worth learning some of the most commonly used tools:

- SQL/RDB;

- R and Python;

- Excel;

- SAS and SPSS;

-Hadoop.

There are lots of roles that involve working with analytics and big data,
but some of the most common titles are:

- Data Analyst - Common skills that you will be asked for include
SQL, R, SAS and Excel, and often Hadoop.

- Data Scientist - As well as the analytics skills that an analyst
will be expected to have, data scientists will be expected to have programming
skills (Java or Python).

In 2014, for the second year, O'Reilly Media conducted an anonymous survey
to expose the tools successful data analysts and engineers use, and how those
tool choices might relate to their salary.

By a considerable margin, the most broadly-used software was SQL , which
was selected by 71% of respondents.

R and Python were the next most widely-used tools — they were selected by
43% and 41% of survey-takers, respectively.

"R and Python are likely popular because they are easily accessible
and effective open source tools for analysis",the authors of the report
note.

Moreover, statistics has been working on collecting and analyzing data even
before computers existed. Whatever technological revolutions that may occur,
statistics will remain relevant because if we can measure something, we improve
it.

Related skills were also ranked highly:

6. Business Intelligence

10. Perl/Python/Ruby

11. Data Engineering and Data Warehousing

The rest of the LinkedIn's list was populated by tech skills.

Hottest Skills of 2014 on LinkedIn:

1. Statistical analysis and data mining

2. Middleware and integration software

3. Storage systems and management

4. Network and information security

5. SEO/SEM Marketing

6. Business intelligence

7. Mobile development

8. Web architecture and development framework

9. Algorithm design

10. Perl/Python/Ruby

Last year, the top 2013 LinkedIn skill was Social Media Marketing, with
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining ranked at 5.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

I always find
it fascinating to read about trends in the use of programming languages.

Based on a
formula assessing Internet searches on languages, the Tiobe Index named
JavaScript its Language of the Year for 2014.

“After all these years, JavaScript has finally
become TIOBE's language of the year. It was a close finish. Swift and R
appeared to be the main candidates for the title but due to a deep fall of
Objective-C this month, a lot of other languages took advantage of this and
surpassed these two candidates at the last moment.” Tiobe said.

TIOBE
programming index is “a measure of popularity of programming languages,
calculated from number of search engine results for queries containing the name
of the language” (TIOBE Programming Community Index Definition"). TIOBE
takes into account only Turing complete languages, so some popular languages
like HTML or SQL are not present in ranking.

JavaScript
has won the award because it had an increase of roughly 1.70 percent of share.
"The JavaScript programming language has a long history and is always
considered as the 'ugly duckling' from a language design point of view.
Nevertheless, JavaScript has become the standard browser language through the
years," Tiobe said.

So, is
JavaScript the Language of the Future?

Despite
being on the 10th ranked programming language in the latest Tiobe Index,
JavaScript is the dominant programming language choice for startups (see the
growing use of JavaScript on GitHub in recent years – now is the top language.

JavaScript
is one of the preferred ways of developing applications for Windows 8's new UI.

They say being
able to use the same language on the front end and the back end makes life
easier for development teams.

The PyPL (Popularity of Programming Language) index, which analyzes Google searches on
language tutorials (the more a specific language tutorial is searched, the more
popular the language is assumed to be), named Swift its Language of the Year
for 2014.

Swift had a
rating of 3 percent for 2014 and ranked ninth on PyPL's index for the month,
jumping past two long-established languages: Ruby and Visual Basic.

In the
January PyPL index, Java was tops, with a 25.8 percent share, followed by PHP
(12.4 percent), Python (11.8 percent), C# (9.9 percent), and C++ (8.7 percent).